AN OVERBROAD PATENT ON prioritizing search results based on content creation trends of terms in the search results - This application from IBM seeks to patent the idea of...Receiving search results in response to a search query, ranking the search results, retrieving trend data related to terms in the search results, weighting the ranked search results according to the trend data, and displaying the weighted ranked search results! 10 minutes of your time can help narrow US patent applications before they become patents. Follow @askpatents on twitter to help.

QUESTION - Have you seen anything that was published before 6/14/2011 that discusses:

Ranking search results based on trend data related to terms in the search results

If so, please submit evidence of prior art as an answer to this question. We welcome multiple answers from the same individual.

EXTRA CREDIT - Trend data indicates an extent to which a content associated with the terms in the search query and/or search results have been requested and/or retrieved by other users, or created by other users for example in the form of blog entries, wiki pages, news stories, twitter tweets and the like, and can be provided by a trend service such as the "Insights" (TM'') tool provided by Google Inc.

TITLE: Weighting rank of search results based on trend data related to terms in the search results

Summary: [Translated from Legalese into English] Receiving search results in response to a search query, ranking the search results according to a ranking factor, retrieving trend data that indicates a degree to which documents associated with the terms in the search results have been created, weighting the rank of the search results based on the trend data, and displaying the weighted rank of the search results.

A method for ranking search results based upon content creation trends, the method comprising:

Receiving a result set of results from a search engine produced in response to a search engine query of a plurality of search terms;

Ranking the results of the result set according to at least one ranking factor;

Retrieving trend data indicating content creation trends from a trend feed offered by a commercial trend service for terms associated with the results of the result set, the trend data including data indicating a degree to which documents in the form of blog entries, wiki pages, news stories, and twitter tweets associated with the plurality of search terms corresponding to the results of the result set have been created;

Weighting the ranked results in the result set according to the retrieved trend data; and

Displaying the weighted ranked results in response to the search engine query.

In English this means:

A method for ranking search results, the method comprising:

Receiving search results from a search engine in response to a search query;

3b. The trend data indicates a degree to which contents related to terms in the search results have been created;

Weighting the ranked search results according to trend data; and

Displaying the weighted search results.

Good prior art would be evidence of a system that did each and every one of these steps prior to 6/14/2011

You're probably aware of ten pieces of art that meet this criteria already... separately, the applicant is claiming Weight for each rank corresponding to the search results is computed based upon a combination of 1. a mutual expectation function that measures how likely a search term of the search query giving rise to the corresponding search results and an additional search term not included in the search query will occur together, 2. a mutual dependency function measuring how strongly the additional search term relates to the search terms in current content creation, and 3. a relevancy function calculating relevancy of the search terms to the corresponding search results.

"Prioritizing search results based on terms in the search results" from the Applicant

This patent include capturing click-based data which influences subsequent search result, so in a sense it is building its on trending data source. I have noticed this type of behavior when searching via Google, where my previous searches influence my subsequent search results. Internally it would be building trending data about my searching profile.

The one bit of the IBM patent which I cant wrap my head around is 'trend data indicating content creation trends'. This seems very Content Management System (CMS) focused, in the sense, a user authors content then searches. I wonder if the use case which lead to the patent was as a helper function to CMS content producers. for example, I only create sport related articles, therefore when I search previous articles I'd like my results focused on sport (could a be a helper to find references and citations or maybe my previous articles)